The invention relates to displaying content and managing a cursor in a graphical user interface of a computer system.
Computer system graphical user interfaces, such as are provided by the Mac OS.RTM. or Windows.RTM. 95 operating systems, typically include a floating cursor. The user interface displays the floating cursor on a display screen superimposed over the "real" content of the screen, such as graphics or text. A user typically causes the floating cursor to move in response to gestures applied to a pointing device, such as a mouse, or by commands entered through a keyboard. Because the floating cursor would otherwise be displayed, the user typically moves the cursor to a different portion of the screen to see content obscured by the cursor.
In some conventional word processing application programs, the program causes the floating cursor to disappear when the user begins to type to enter text. While this is useful, the floating cursor still obscures text when the user performs some action other than typing text, such as scrolling through the document or opening a new document.
In addition, other application programs which display images typically do not alter the cursor when displaying new content. For example, in a web browser application, such as Netscape Navigator.TM., when a user clicks on a link, the browser displays a new page of content. The cursor, however, is still in the same location on the screen and often obscures some of the new content.